The Securities & Exchange Commissions (SEC) requires companies to file various types of financial reports and financial reports are also widely published by other organizations for various non-regulatory commercial purposes. Reporting obligations to the SEC are usually satisfied by companies filing with the SEC various types of reports. Other types of reports containing financial information, such as financial research reports, are also known. These and other financial reports may be published in PDF, Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet format, Microsoft Word® word processor format, Extensible Markup Language (XML), HyperText Markup Language (HTML) or other types of document formats. Each of these formats has certain disadvantages. For example, a PDF document is relatively static, not easily customizable, and does not have analysis capability, among other things. Information in spreadsheets (e.g., Excel®) and text documents (e.g., Word®) often require extensive importing and exporting to or from multiple files and additional work in order to create comparison views. It is also very difficult to search for specific content within these other document formats. XML data generally requires the use of a browser-based application (with or without the use of stylesheets) or importation into another application format, such as spreadsheet or other document format, to view the information. These browsers and other applications either have very limited capabilities with respect to customizing the display of and analyzing such data or require that extensive additional work be performed in order to do so. Other drawbacks exist with these and other known document formats and applications.
Another set of problems relates to the fact that different companies may use different taxonomies, or data schemas, to express the terms used in various financial reports. This can make it very difficult to automatically analyze and directly compare multiple companies' financial data with each other without having to do substantial manual data manipulation, which is time consuming and generally inefficient and error prone.
Recently, eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) has emerged as a standard for creating financial and other business reports. XBRL is an XML-based markup language created specifically for financial and other business reporting. It allows individual items of financial data to be identified using computer readable tags and associated metadata. The specification for creating XBRL documents is known in the art of financial reporting and can be found at http://www.xbrl.org. The current specification (version 2.1) is hereby incorporated it its entirety herein. However, the invention is not so limited. Past and subsequent versions of XBRL (and other formats) can be used with the invention. The current XBRL specification relates primarily to how the XBRL data is tagged, structured and associated with metadata. It is less concerned with how the data is presented to the user or analyzed. Nor does it relate to client side processing of data contained in published reports.
XBRL enables unique identifying tags (labels) to be applied to items of financial data (e.g., ‘net profit’) and provides links to a range of other information about the item, such as a definition, value type, alternative labels etc, collectively referred to as metadata. XBRL also allows labels in any language to be applied to items, as well as accounting references or other definitional information. The XBRL specification contains a design structure for how items within a report are related to one another through referenced calculation links. It allows for groupings of items for organizational or presentational purposes, but this capability is limited and the current specification's presentation capabilities are insufficient to capture formatting common to financial statements. XBRL is extensible, so companies and other organizations can adapt it to meet a variety of special requirements.
Information can be converted into XBRL format by suitable mapping processes or generated in XBRL by software in a known manner. There are many known tools used for creation of XBRL documents. Various taxonomies exist for use in business and financial reports for use in different industries and accounting regimes which can then also be extended through incorporation of additional taxonomies for publisher-specific use. The XBRL formatted data can be exchanged between entities via the internet for regulatory reporting and other purposes
However, current implementations of XBRL are not without limitation. XBRL documents may adhere to different taxonomies or schemas which are not directly comparable. There are also a limited number of methods to view the content of XBRL documents which is either performed using complex taxonomy design applications, through reference into other application formats such as spreadsheets or through internet browser-based systems with limited functionality. The current XBRL specification also has little to no support for presentation formatting information, so the display of such information may not be as the publisher intended. Further limitations pertain to the analysis of XBRL information which is usually performed after being brought into a spreadsheet application or is limited to simple pre-defined ratios displayed in browser-based applications. Browser-based and other applications have many limitations with respect to presenting information in end user customizable format. Moreover, it is specifically difficult for end users to analyze data in a browser-based application. Browsers used to display XBRL information generally lack the ability to analyze and directly compare large amounts of financial data from different documents at the same time. Currently, the analysis of XBRL data over multiple financial reports from the same or multiple companies is generally performed by manually exporting the data for each report to a separate application that enables such analysis (e.g. Excel). Use of browsers, with or without stylesheet transformation, to view XBRL reports also makes it difficult for end users to change the presentation to suit their needs or produce customized reports.
Additionally, different publishers of XBRL reports use different taxonomies. So the data from the reports are often not suitable for automated analysis and is not directly comparable. Additionally, data in such financial reports is generally “static” as of the date of the publication of the report. For example, if the report refers to the stock price, it is often the price as of the day of publication of the report (or a fixed date, e.g., the closing price on the last day of the quarter or fiscal year for which the report pertains).
As XBRL was envisioned primarily as a financial information transmission protocol, the XBRL specification contains little to no presentation information aside from the ordered listing of items and their parent-child relationship through presentation links. Also, as the taxonomy information and item meta-data is generally made available through internet reference, it is not available for off-line use unless saved to a local computer, which inhibits off-line use.